Brazilians

Just playing through on piano, one of my all time favorite tunes: Spring Is Here.

Last night on the Bateaux Kyle and Joey were both away, so I led. Adam Asarnow, Mark McCaron and Linda Sue was singing. It was a nice hit. They all sounded great. First set we played The Song Is You, Speak Low, Sweet and Lovely, and then we did a quick Corcovado - Mark played the head in and I sang it out.

The voice felt good. I don't know, I just felt something there behind it that wasn't there before. It felt kind of effortless. That's my biggest hangup with singing I think - too MUCH effort! You can't "force it" out. It really is analogous to the shakuhachi. I remember addressing this with Jim when I was "trying" to get a bigger sound, and thereby tightening all of the muscles in my mouth area. Imagine my surprise when I found out it was just the OPPOSITE of that! You've got to have support, yes (from the diaphragm with singing, diaphragm/mouth with shakuhachi), but once that is established it is so much more about relaxing and letting the sound vibrate through you. What is tense and taught doesn't vibrate. It is acoustically dead. There's a metaphor in there somewhere.

So anyway, at the end of Corcovado, these two tables in particular started applauding more than the others. Turns out it was some Brazilians visiting from Pfizer. One of the guys came up and we chatted a bit. I need to get back to working on my spoken Portuguese.

Shak

Had my lesson with Jim yesterday. We got thru Tsuru no Sugomori and I will finish it next week. That is a cool piece. Very active and melodic for Honkyoku. So after next week we'll have only 8 pieces left before we go back to the beginning and review the entire repertoire for the teaching level.